By Carl Zichella & Leisa Brug | The Arizona Republic
(Editor’s note: Opinion pieces are posted for discussion purposes only.)
Arizona Public Service Co. recently announced it would participate in a Western energy-trading market after finding it would save customers millions of dollars every year.
This is part of a movement toward a more coordinated and reliable grid across the Western United States. When APS joins the market in 2017, it will join four utilities serving more than 35 million customers across eight states, with more expected to follow.
The energy-imbalance market, an aggregated system of individual utilities and regional grids, will allow APS to buy and sell electricity when its system has too little or too much supply to meet the minute-to-minute demands of its customers.
